Everything you need to know about Social Security.

William Voegeli looks into the origins of Social Security. I wish there were some way to make every American read and understand it. It discusses how we were persuaded to support a system where regressive taxes was sold as a "savings" plan.

Here are some interesting quotes:

Chris Suellentrop:

Liberals are willing to keep paying rich people Social Security in the hopes that the payments will keep those rich people from figuring out that Social Security is a redistributive transfer program.

Wilbur Cohen:

[P]rograms only for the poor have been lousy, no good, poor programs. And a program that is only for the poor--one that has nothing in it for the middle income and the upper income--is, in the long run, a program the American public won't support.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Those taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll taxes there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.

Smart politician, that FDR.

The gist of the piece is that Social Security was structured and sold as insurance, a savings program, when in fact it is nothing more than a system of redistribution of wealth from the working population to retirees, and it violates liberals' professions of desiring equality all over the place.